(profile)

[livingrestless]

BASICS
FULL NAME: Isabella Marie Swan
NICKNAMES: Bella, Bells
AGE: 18
DATE OF BIRTH: September 13
RESIDENCE: Forks, WA
OCCUPATION: Student

HEIGHT: 5' 4"
WEIGHT: 115 lbs
HAIR COLOUR: Brown
EYE COLOUR: Brown
FIRST IMPRESSION: A lanky teenager with a morose air, withdrawn, introverted, and shy; unremarkable in appearance or temperament.

FAMILY: Renee Dwyer (mother), Charlie Swan (father), Phil Dwyer (step-father), Marie Higgenbotham (grandmother), John Higgenbotham (grandfather), Geoffrey Swan (grandfather), Helen Swan (grandmother)
MARITAL STATUS: Single

PERSONALITY
Notes for now!!

- Moody, introspective; Bella may come across as sad and/or depressed to other people (or angry, depending on her mood), when really that's just... her natural expression. She doesn't smile much.
- Quiet, untalkative -- when she does speak, she tends to stutter and utilise a lot of verbal static (uh, um, like, er), speaking in a combination of run-on sentences and abrupt sentence fragments. She's uncomfortable having attention paid to her and gets more anxious the more closely people are watching her.
- Intelligent, but rash and impulsive. She tends to make snap decisions and then sticks to them even when it's clear that it was the wrong thing to do. She is incredibly stubborn.
- Her tendency towards impulsiveness has her often making decisions without consulting other people, rather, she just makes assumptions about them and goes off of that. This can be useful in that she can learn to channel it specifically to leadership -- her ability to make decisions without needing to consult other people for validation is actually pretty rare in her peer group -- but she's pretty dramatic and has low self-esteem, so generally what she assumes about people is that they're bigger jerks than they actually are.
- Brave, often to the point of complete idiocy.

HISTORY
Bella Swan was born on a typical rainy day in Forks, a small town in northwestern Washington, to a young couple who divorced when she was only six months old. Her mother moved to Riverside, California with Bella and stayed there until she was five, when they moved again to Phoenix. As a child, Bella usually spent her summers with her father in Forks and the rest of the year with her mother, until she was fourteen and put her foot down -- she didn't think it was fair that she had to fly across the country every summer and everyone else got to stay put. Charlie started coming to Phoenix for two weeks every summer instead.

As a child, Bella was socially awkward and very shy. She had trouble making friends anywhere as she wasn't normally the type to initiate conversations with strangers; as a result, the few friends she had were mostly the ones who made a point of approaching her, such as her father's friend's son, Jacob Black. Bella had an extremely close relationship with her mother, who was a bit scatter-brained and free-spirited, meaning that Bella matured quickly in order to take care of and protect her mother. She took piano and ballet lessons as a child but eventually quit both as she was (admittedly) not very good at either; she was clumsy and uncoordinated.

When Bella was 17, her mother married Phil Dwyer, a pitcher for a minor league baseball team whose job required him to travel frequently for most of the year. Sensing her mother's need for privacy with her new husband, Bella offered to move in with her dad in Forks, where she could finish out high school (and not have to listen to the newlyweds do it every night.) Charlie missed his daughter terribly and agreed, although their relationship was extremely strained by the time and distance that had separated them for most of their lives; Charlie was less like a father to Bella and more like some distant relation.

Bella enrolled at Forks High School, where she immediately attracted a lot of notice due to being the new kid in a small town in the middle of the school year. She was quickly approached by a group of students who wanted to befriend her, although Bella's poor social skills made it difficult for her to forge strong friendships with any of them and they mostly remained acquaintances. She also had the opportunity to reunite with her childhood friend, Jacob; they bonded quickly when Bella acquired an old used truck and Jacob offered to help show her how to use it without careening off a cliff as she was wont to do.

At school, Bella also attracted the notice of the Cullens -- a group of mysterious students who never showed up to school on sunny days and kept to themselves. Specifically, she caught the eye of Edward, the oldest. Edward's reaction to her initially was extremely negative, or so Bella believed -- he behaved strangely around her, acting like she stunk and that he hated her for no particular reason. Hurt by the apparent arbitrary rejection, Bella made a few attempts to get to know Edward, finding that he was extremely hot and cold with her. One moment he'd be acting like he wanted to be friends, and the next he'd talk like he was warning her away from him. Not understanding his strange behaviour, and thinking his "what if I'm the bad guy" bullshit was him being a melodramatic dick, Bella floundered in frustration.

When another student lost control of his van in the parking lot and nearly hit her, Edward rescued her, but Bella realised that something was off when she recalled the incident and knew that he had been too far away to have reached her in time. When she confronted him with this information, Edward basically called her an idiot who was hallucinating things and flailed off. Confused, Bella tried to put it out of her mind, but it was difficult when Edward kept approaching her, bordering on harassing. He'd come up and talk to her, insult her, and walk away; he'd sit next to her in class and ignore her; he'd stare at her from across the cafeteria, not eating, not moving. Unbeknownst to Bella, he was stalking her. He broke into her house and watched her sleep; he went through her things; he read the minds of the people around her to try and catch a glimpse of Bella's thoughts, which he could not read. He followed her to Port Angeles when Bella went prom dress shopping with her friends, and intervened when Bella was approached by a group of muggers, then took her out to dinner, where he ate nothing and talked strangely about being able to read people's minds.

At this point, Bella was starting to put two and two together. There was something off about him, something distinctly not normal, and the threatening way he behaved around her -- like he wanted to hurt her half the time, and half the time he didn't -- was hitting off huge alarm bells in her head. On a trip to the La Push reservation a few weeks before, Bella had spent some time with Jacob, who revealed (slightly reluctantly) to her that there was definitely something wrong with the Cullens, that they were called "the Cold Ones" and were not allowed on the reservation. A quick Googling and Bella had mostly pieced it together. Ice cold, pale white skin, never coming out in the sun, impossibly strong and fast, supposedly known to drink blood?

Yeah. Vampire.

She confronted Edward in the woods, eventually, and he confirmed it. He also admitted he'd been following her, and that the scent of her blood was completely intoxicating to him, and that it took all his self-control not to tear her throat out. "You're like my own, personal brand of heroin." Frightened, she told him to stay away from her, and fled; he let her go, but still continued to watch and follow her.

Some time later, a small vampire coven moved into the Cullens' territory and started murdering townsfolk in and around Forks. When their tracker, James, caught Bella's scent, he immediately zeroed in on her, but the Cullens, knowing how bad it would be for the grisly murder of the police chief's daughter to happen in their territory, intervened. They took Bella out of the state while using her clothes to spread her scent in various directions to confuse James, but he eventually caught on to their deception and managed to track the Cullens and Bella. James lured Bella into her old ballet studio in Phoenix alone and taunted her, planning on filming himself killing her and sending it to Edward, who arrived at the last second and fought and killed James, who had bitten Bella anyway. When the rest of the Cullens arrived, they disposed of the body and Carlisle sucked the vampire venom out of Bella's blood, keeping her human. She went on to recuperate for two weeks in a hospital, and returned to Forks in time to make it to prom. She went alone and left early, feeling awkward.

She and the Cullens managed to work out an uneasy truce; if they left her alone, she wouldn't reveal their secret. They went to a lot of effort to keep her alive; she was pretty sure they wouldn't just kill her to shut her up, but she still felt uncomfortable and frightened of them, especially Edward. She began spending more time with her old friend Jacob, finding excuses to spend time with him -- bringing him junky motorbikes to teach her how to fix up and ride, going to the movies, study dates, fishing, attending Pow Wows with him -- since he knew a lot about vampires (even if they never used that word aloud -- they only spoke of it in euphemisms) and seemed invested in protecting her. But the more time she spent with Jacob, the more things started to seem a little strange about him, especially with the Cullens spending more time around Bella, and Edward's continued to become more and more unstable.